I Am Exhausted!

I’m so goddamn tired of pretending this is normal.

Every morning, I used to wake up to the same sick joke. My phone had been pinging all night with manufactured emergencies, and before my eyes even focused, I was already reaching for it like a junkie reaching for a fix. I couldn’t do this anymore. None of us can, but we’re all too afraid to admit it. I’m tired of watching friends disappear mid-conversation into screens, tired of seeing twelve-year-olds with candy-flavored nicotine clouds, tired of needing three different apps just to order dinner. But most of all, I’m tired of being told this is progress when it’s clearly killing us.

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We are the first generation in human history to grow up with a casino in our pocket, and the house always wins. Every app, every notification, every little ping is nothing but a dealer giving you a free sample. While we believe we’re in control, we’ve long been part of a game we can’t win anymore. We’ve gotten used to addiction as everyday life, not as a problem but as the normal state.

Let’s talk numbers, because the scale of this disaster needs to be understood. In the United States, studies show between 4,000 to 7,000 school children are already hooked on vapes. School children. Kids who don’t even have bank cards are organizing bulk nicotine orders through Snapchat and Discord, sucking down Mango Ice and Cherry Freeze and Cotton Candy Cloud in bathroom stalls between algebra and history class. These USB-stick-looking devices pump out clouds that smell like a candy factory, and we wonder why kids think they’re harmless.

The vaping industry learned from Big Tobacco’s mistakes. No more cowboys dying of lung cancer. Now it’s TikTok influencers casually holding these devices while they talk about their morning routines. Instead of Marlboro Red, we have flavors that sound like the menu at a frozen yogurt shop: Blue Raspberry Ice, Watermelon Bubble Gum, Unicorn Milk. The packaging is bright, flashy, appealing to kids who would never touch a traditional cigarette but will happily inhale nicotine because it tastes like their favorite candy.

But nicotine is just one head of this hydra. Let’s talk about the real monster: the smartphone. This isn’t a phone anymore; it’s a superstimulus delivery system designed by armies of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists whose only job is to hack your brain. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, admitted it openly: “We need to give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post. It’s a social validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Every feature is deliberately designed using Dark Design principles. The pull-to-refresh mechanism is based on slot machine psychology – variable ratio reinforcement, the most addictive reward schedule known to behavioral science. You pull down, maybe you get new good content, maybe you don’t. That uncertainty, that “maybe this time” feeling, is what keeps you pulling, scrolling, checking, even when you know there’s nothing good there.

The red notification badges trigger the same neural pathways as seeing blood or fire – evolutionary alarm systems hijacked to make you check your mentions. The typing indicators that show someone is responding create anxiety loops that keep you glued to the screen. Snapchat streaks that reset if you don’t respond within 24 hours, turning friendship into a Tamagotchi you have to constantly feed or it dies.

TikTok and Instagram Reels have perfected the formula. The algorithm watches everything: how long you linger on each video, what you replay, what makes you stop scrolling. It builds a psychological profile more detailed than any therapist could create, then uses it to serve you exactly what will keep you paralyzed. Nine boring videos, then one that makes you laugh. Back to mediocre content, then something that triggers outrage. They’re not just showing you content; they’re conducting behavioral conditioning on a massive scale.

Las Vegas is empty because it has become too expensive? Maybe, but the gambling industry also moved from Vegas into your pocket—and it’s cheaper to stay home. Loot boxes in games marketed to children are literally slot machines with better graphics. FIFA Ultimate Team, where kids spend thousands of dollars trying to pack Ronaldo or Messi. Genshin Impact, where pulling for characters uses the exact same gacha mechanics that have created millions of gambling addicts in Japan. Counter-Strike cases, Fortnite skins, Call of Duty battle passes – it’s all gambling, just wrapped in gaming terminology to bypass regulations.

Sports betting apps turned every game into a potential financial catastrophe. DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM – they offer “risk-free” bets (there’s no such thing), micro-bets on whether the next play will be a pass or run, parlays that promise massive payouts but are mathematically designed to drain your account. You can’t watch a game without being bombarded with odds, bonuses, and “limited time” promotions. People are losing rent money because LeBron scored 38 points instead of 40, because the third quarter total was 57 instead of 58.

It’s not even called “betting” anymore. Polymarket calls it “prediction market” — sounds less loathsome, doesn’t it? It’s still online gambling. And online gambling addiction among 18-24 year-olds has increased by 400% in the last five years. The average gambling addict loses $55,000 before seeking help. But by then, they’ve usually destroyed their relationships, credit, and mental health simply because they wanted to bet on whether Sydney Sweeney will start selling pictures of her feet in 2025 or something equally idiotic.

Food became the next frontier. Ultra-processed foods are engineered in laboratories by food scientists who talk about the “bliss point” – the perfect combination of sugar, salt, and fat that overrides your satiety signals and keeps you eating. Doritos have been literally engineered to melt at exactly the right rate to make your brain think you haven’t eaten anything substantial, so you keep reaching for more.

Food delivery apps gamified eating. Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub – they all have point systems, streak rewards, limited-time offers. McDonald’s app sends push notifications at precisely the times when your blood sugar is most likely to be low. Domino’s tracks your pizza with more detail than NASA tracks satellites. People have loyalty status with fast-food chains that rivals their airline memberships.

The mukbang phenomenon on TikTok and YouTube – people consuming 10,000+ calories in a single sitting while millions watch – has normalized binge eating as entertainment. Creators like Nikocado Avocado have documented their descent from healthy vegans to morbidly obese, all for views and ad revenue. We’re watching people eat themselves to death in real-time and calling it content.

Energy drinks deserve their own circle of hell. Monster, Red Bull, Bang, Ghost, Prime – these aren’t beverages; they’re liquid amphetamines. A single can of Bang contains 300mg of caffeine. The FDA recommends no more than 400mg per day for adults, and teenagers are drinking two or three of these plus pre-workout supplements that push them over 600-700mg daily.

The case of 21-year-old Sarah Katz should terrify everyone. She died from cardiac arrest after drinking Panera’s Charged Lemonade, which contained 390mg of caffeine – more than four Red Bulls – but was marketed as a regular lemonade. Her heart just couldn’t take it anymore.

But caffeine doesn’t wake you up; it just blocks adenosine receptors that signal tiredness. Your body is still exhausted; you just can’t feel it. It’s like removing the check engine light instead of fixing the engine. And we’ve built an entire culture around this chemical dependency. “But first, coffee” merchandise. “Don’t talk to me before my coffee” personality types. Starbucks turned drug addiction into a lifestyle brand with 87,000 possible drink combinations, each one a sugar-and-caffeine bomb that costs $8 and contains 600 calories.

The fitness industry, which should be the antidote, became another dealer. Instagram and TikTok fitness influencers – most of them on steroids while claiming natural – sell impossible dreams to teenagers. The “natty or not” debates are a joke when 16-year-olds are ordering SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators) from sketchy websites and injecting themselves based on YouTube tutorials.

Body dysmorphia rates have exploded. Teenage boys are taking trenbolone – a veterinary steroid meant for cattle – because they saw someone on TikTok gain 30 pounds of muscle in three months. Girls are using clenbuterol, a horse asthma medication that can cause heart attacks, because fitness influencers promoted it for fat loss. Eating disorders disguised as “clean eating,” exercise addiction masked as “discipline,” and everyone posting transformation photos for validation from strangers.

The gym became a content creation studio. People spend more time setting up cameras than lifting weights. Every workout needs to be filmed, edited, posted. The actual health benefits are secondary to the dopamine hit from likes and comments. Planet Fitness’s “lunk alarm” seems quaint now that every gym is full of tripods and ring lights.

Porn addiction gets worse every year, but nobody wants to talk about it. The average age of first exposure to pornography is now 11 years old. Eleven. These kids’ brains are being rewired before they’ve even hit puberty. Porn sites get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and X combined. PornHub alone had 42 billion visits last year – that’s 5.8 visits for every person on Earth.

The term “gooning” – spending hours in masturbation marathons, often while high, lost in an endless cycle of edging and browsing – has become normalized in online communities. People joke about it, but it’s describing a dissociative state where users lose hours or even entire days. Erectile dysfunction in men under 30 has increased by 500% in the last decade.

AI-generated porn and OnlyFans parasocial relationships are creating a generation of men who prefer digital stimulation (mostly with degrading aspects towards women)x to actual human connection. They’re not just consuming content; they’re replacing real relationships with algorithmic fantasies. The implications for actual intimacy, for birth rates, for the basic ability to connect with another human being, are catastrophic.

Weed went from counterculture to venture capital in record time. It’s not your hippie uncle’s joint anymore; it’s a multi-billion dollar industry selling THC in every conceivable form. Gummies, vapes, tinctures, beverages – all with THC percentages that would have been considered impossible a generation ago. 1970s weed was about 3% THC. Today’s dispensary products regularly hit 20-30%, with concentrates reaching 90%.

“Elon Musk smokes weed, too. It can’t be bad.” Yeah, but Elon Musk also builds freaking rockets, while your greatest achievement today was not falling asleep while showering.

People microdosing throughout the day, wake-and-baking as a morning routine, convinced it makes them more creative or productive while their short-term memory evaporates and their motivation flatlines. The “it’s just a plant” argument falls apart when that plant has been genetically modified to be 10 times stronger than anything that existed naturally.

Social media turned human connection into a performance metric. We don’t have friends; we have followers. We don’t have conversations; we have engagement rates. Birthday wishes became Facebook notifications. Sympathy became emoji reactions. Every life event needs to be documented, hashtagged, and optimized for maximum reach.

The comparison trap is inescapable. You’re not just keeping up with the Joneses next door; you’re competing with everyone, everywhere, all the time. LinkedIn makes you feel like a professional failure. Instagram makes you feel ugly and poor. TikTok makes you feel old and irrelevant. Twitter makes you angry at strangers you’ll never meet about issues you can’t control.

YouTube Kids, supposedly the safe version, autoplays videos designed to be as addictive as possible. Elsagate scandals revealed disturbing content targeted at children. Roblox, marketed as a kids’ game, has gambling mechanics and predators. Screen time for children under 5 has tripled in the last decade. We’re raising iPad kids who have meltdowns when the battery dies because they’ve never learned to exist without constant stimulation.

Educational apps claim to teach but really just train kids to need constant feedback and rewards. Instead of learning patience and deep thinking, they’re learning to expect immediate gratification for every small action. Gold stars, point systems, achievement unlocks – we’re gamifying childhood and wondering why kids can’t focus without constant external validation.

The subscription economy ensures you own nothing and pay forever. Netflix, Spotify, Adobe, Microsoft – everything is a monthly fee that never ends. You’ll pay more for Photoshop in two years than buying it outright used to cost, but you’ll never own it. Cancel your subscription and your work disappears. It’s digital feudalism, and we’re all serfs paying rent on our own lives.

Meditation apps – another subscription-based solution – are part of the problem. Headspace, Calm, Ten Percent Happier – they send push notifications reminding you to be mindful and listen to their AI-narrated meditations. The irony of needing an app to disconnect from apps is lost on nobody, but we download them anyway because we’re desperate for any solution, even one that perpetuates the problem.

Sleep, the most basic human need, has been commodified and gamified. Sleep tracking apps, smart mattresses that monitor your REM cycles, supplements, mouth tape, specialized pillows – we’ve turned rest into another optimization project. People stress about their sleep scores, which keeps them awake, which lowers their sleep scores. It’s insanity.

Dating apps turned love into a marketplace. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge – they use the same variable ratio reinforcement as slot machines. Swipe, swipe, swipe, match! Or, if you are a guy: Swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, … I guess you get the idea. The dopamine hit of a match, the anxiety of crafting the perfect message, the ghosting, the breadcrumbing, the endless cycle of hope and disappointment. We’ve reduced human connection to a hot-or-not game where everyone loses.

The paradox of choice paralyzes us. Why commit to one person when there might be someone better one swipe away? Why work through problems when you can just download a new relationship? The average user spends 90 minutes a day on dating apps. That’s 10 hours a week shopping for humans like they’re items on Amazon.

Even death isn’t sacred anymore. People livestream funerals. Memorial pages become spaces for performative grief. “RIP” posts from people who barely knew the deceased, all for the engagement. We can’t even die without it becoming content.

The environmental cost is staggering. Data centers consuming more electricity than entire countries. Planned obsolescence ensuring you need a new phone every two years. Lithium mining for batteries destroying ecosystems. E-waste poisoning communities in developing nations. We’re literally destroying the planet for faster refresh rates and slightly better cameras.

But the real cost isn’t measured in dollars or carbon emissions. It’s measured in lost potential. Every hour spent scrolling is an hour not spent creating. Every dopamine hit from a notification is a moment of presence sacrificed. We’re trading our finite existence for infinite feeds, and the exchange rate is crushing us.

The solution is recognizing that we’re in a war for our consciousness. Every app is enemy territory. Every notification is an attack. Every algorithm is designed to defeat you.

But here’s what makes me angriest: We know all of this. Every single person reading this recognizes themselves in these descriptions. We all feel the exhaustion, the anxiety, the sense that life is slipping away while we watch strangers dance on vertical videos. We know we’re being played, and we keep playing anyway because the entire system is designed to make alternatives feel impossible.

The companies know exactly what they’re doing. Internal documents from Facebook show they knew Instagram was damaging teenage girls’ mental health. They did nothing. Google knows YouTube’s algorithm radicalizes people. They optimized it for watch time anyway. The gambling industry knows their apps destroy lives. They sponsor sports teams and target vulnerable populations anyway.

Our suffering is their profit margin. Our addiction is their growth strategy. Our destroyed attention spans, ruined relationships, and deteriorating mental health are all acceptable collateral damage in their quarterly earnings reports.

I’m done. Done pretending this is evolution when it’s clearly degeneration. Done acting like we can find balance in a system designed for extremes. Done accepting that constant exhaustion, anxiety, and emptiness are just the price of modern life.

The question isn’t whether you’re addicted. You are. We all are. The question is: How much more are you willing to lose before you fight back? How many more years will you sacrifice to the algorithm? How much more of your life will you let them steal?

Because they will take everything if we let them. Every moment, every thought, every genuine human experience will be commodified, gamified, and fed back to us through a screen until we forget what real life felt like. They’ll take our memories and turn them into Instagram stories. They’ll take our friendships and reduce them to emoji reactions. They’ll take our love and compress it into swipe decisions. They’ll take our children’s imaginations and replace them with algorithmic suggestions. They’ll take the quiet moments where wisdom grows and fill them with notification anxiety. They’ll take everything sacred, everything human, everything real, and sell it back to us as a premium subscription we can never quite afford but can’t live without.

It’s funny. I have either never been addicted to most of the things I mentioned here, or I have already rigorously regulated them. Social media, endless videos, endless bombardment of my senses. I deleted most of it years ago. I put my phone in another room when I sleep. I read actual books. I take walks without earbuds. And still, I am exhausted by it.

Because it’s not enough to save yourself when everyone around you is drowning.

I am exhausted by others not being exhausted by it. By the blank stares when I suggest we put our phones away at dinner. By the panic when someone’s battery dies, like they’ve lost a vital organ. By the way conversations halt mid-sentence for notification checks, and nobody even apologizes anymore because this is just how we communicate now – in fragments, between alerts, never fully present.

I’m tired of shallow talk. Tired of conversations that never go deeper than whatever everyone saw on their feed that morning. Tired of people who can quote TikTok verbatim but can’t remember what we discussed last week. Tired of the nervous laughter that fills the silence when nobody knows how to just exist together without a screen mediating the experience. We’ve forgotten how to be bored together, how to be quiet together, how to be human together.

I’m tired of people having the attention span of goldfish – actually, that’s insulting to goldfish. At least they have the excuse of being fish. We’re supposed to be the species that wrote symphonies and solved mathematical theorems and painted the Sistine Chapel. Now we can’t even watch a two-minute video without checking the comments simultaneously. People watch TV shows at 1.5x speed while scrolling their phones, consuming content like it’s a competitive eating contest where the prize is... what? What are we racing toward?

Tired of talking to people so uninspiring, boring and dull that I do not even know what to reply to them. Not because they’re inherently boring – nobody is born boring. But because they’ve outsourced their personality to algorithms. Their opinions are trending topics. Their interests are whatever the algorithm served them this week. Their thoughts are other people’s tweets. They don’t read, they don’t wonder, they don’t question – they just consume and regurgitate, consume and regurgitate, like human content farms optimized for small talk.

I’m exhausted by the death of curiosity. By people who have the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket but only use it to watch teenagers dance and argue with strangers. By the replacement of genuine interests with whatever’s viral this week. By the way nobody develops actual expertise anymore because why learn deeply when you can just ask ChatGPT?

I’m tired of being the only one who seems to remember what life was like before all this. Who remembers when boredom led to creativity instead of scrolling. When waiting in line meant observing the world instead of escaping from it. When a conversation was a conversation, not a podcast opportunity. When friends gathered to be together, not to create content about being together.

But what exhausts me most is the loneliness of clarity. Seeing the matrix doesn’t free you when everyone else is still plugged in. You become the crazy one, the difficult one, the one who “doesn’t get it.” You watch the people you love disappear into their devices, one notification at a time, and there’s nothing you can do except witness the dissolution.

I’ve tried everything. Leading by example – useless when nobody’s watching. Gentle suggestions – met with defensive anger, as if I’ve attacked their identity. Direct confrontation – they agree completely, then immediately check their phone. The addiction is stronger than logic, stronger than love, stronger than the visible evidence of its destruction.

So I exist in this weird purgatory. Clear-headed in a world of fog. Present in a world of absence. Trying to have real conversations with people whose minds are elsewhere, always elsewhere, perpetually elsewhere. It’s like being sober at a party where everyone’s drunk, except the party never ends and the hangover never comes to teach its lesson.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe this is evolution and I’m just a dinosaur refusing to adapt. Maybe the future doesn’t need deep thinking or sustained attention or genuine connection. Maybe we’re heading toward a hive mind where individual consciousness is outdated, where we all think in tweets and feel in emojis and exist primarily as nodes in a network we don’t control.

But then I see a child having a meltdown because iPad time is over, or a couple on a date both staring at screens, or a friend who can’t sleep without checking their phone every few minutes, and I know – this isn’t evolution. It’s devolution. We’re not becoming more connected; we’re becoming more isolated. We’re not becoming smarter; we’re becoming more dependent. We’re not becoming happier; we’re becoming more anxious, more depressed, more empty.

The worst part? The absolute worst part? Even the people who see it feel powerless to stop it. We all know something’s wrong. The rising anxiety isn’t imaginary. The depression epidemic isn’t coincidental. The loneliness despite constant connection isn’t paradoxical – it’s predictable. We know we’re sick. We know what’s making us sick. But we keep taking the poison because the withdrawal seems worse than the slow death.

Look at Apple’s website. They advertise each new iPhone with “all-day battery life,” and everyone immediately screams it’s a lie. “My phone dies by 2 PM!” they rage, one-star reviews flooding in, class-action lawsuits brewing in Reddit threads.

But Apple isn’t lying. Not technically. That battery really would last all day – if you used your phone like an actual phone. A few calls. Some texts. Check the weather. Maybe take a photo or two.

But that’s not how we use it, is it? We’re running a full-scale casino operation from 6 AM to midnight. Streaming, scrolling, refreshing, gaming, tracking, recording – every app running full throttle, screen brightness maxed out, 5G burning through power like we’re trying to contact Mars. We’re using more computational power in our morning bathroom scroll than NASA used to land on the moon, and then we’re shocked – SHOCKED – when the battery taps out.

Try using it the way the manufacturers actually tested it. You know, like a tool instead of an IV drip of digital dopamine. Your battery will last two days. Maybe three. But we can’t, can we? Because the phone lasting all day isn’t the problem. The problem is we literally cannot stop using it for more than five minutes without feeling like we’re missing something, like we’re disconnected from the matrix, like we’re dying.

The battery isn’t failing. We are. And the manufacturers know it. They could make the phone thicker, but why bother? You’ll buy a power bank. You’ll buy a charging case. You’ll upgrade next year anyway, chasing another hour of battery life to feed another hour of addiction.

The phone isn’t broken. We are. Wake up. Please. Before there’s nothing left to save.

Before we forget what it feels like to think our own thoughts instead of algorithmic suggestions. Before we lose the ability to sit with discomfort instead of immediately reaching for digital anesthesia. Before our children grow up thinking this is normal, thinking this is life, thinking this is all there is.

Wake up. Not tomorrow. Not after one more scroll. Not after you check what’s trending. Now. This moment. Choose presence over performance. Choose depth over dopamine. Choose the difficult, beautiful, boring, miraculous reality of actual life over the synthetic satisfaction of digital existence.

Because once we forget what we’ve lost, we won’t even know to mourn it. And that silence – that final, terrible silence when nobody remembers what life felt like before the screens – that’s when they’ve truly won.

But it’s not too late. Not yet. As long as someone, anyone, remembers and refuses to forget, refuses to surrender, refuses to pretend this is acceptable – there’s hope.

Wake up. Please. I’m so tired of being awake alone.

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